THE NEW SPACE RACE: Moon, Mars — China leads to both.

WELL, GOOD: Up to 13% of Dementia Cases May Actually Be a Misdiagnosed Treatable Condition.

Years ago, my doc told me that she had an old woman in whose family thought she was demented. She looked in the woman’s ears and they were jam-packed with wax. 45 minutes of wax removal later (“you wouldn’t believe that all that would fit in there!”) and she was perfectly lucid.

JUSTICE: A THREAD.

2/ Link: https://t.co/71Rglc1qlT Comments to follow.

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) April 19, 2025

ALIENS: Dark, Pitted, and Possibly Alien: The Skull Hill Rock That Has Scientists Stumped.

GET A NEW PAN: HexClad Hybrid Nonstick 12-Inch Frying Pan. #CommissionEarned We have one of these and it works very well.

GRAFT, CENSORSHIP, AND OPPRESSION ALL IN ONE: The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion: The Free Press finds that the Biden administration awarded more than 600 grants.

AS PREDICTED: VW Holding Prices Steady Despite Tariffs—For Now.

CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD: Solareye Compressed Air Duster – 180000RPM Electric Air Duster. #CommissionEarned

SPYING: Sen. Rand Paul Seeks Answers Regarding Secret ATF Surveillance Program.

CLEAN YOUR POOL: AIPER Scuba S1 Cordless Robotic Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

TRUMP’S CIVIL SERVICE REFORM IS BAAACCCKKKK!!!! It was called “Schedule F” late in Trump’s first Oval Office go-round, but the much-revised and improved version released late Friday in his second term is known as “Schedule Policy/Careers,” or SPC.

This could be the most significant step forward in managing the federal bureaucracy since President Ronald Reagan eliminated 100,000 civil service jobs and fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers. Details in my latest Substack column here.

LUCY: NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is speeding toward another close encounter with an asteroid.

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY:

Remember, Democrats will always side with a wife beating gang member over you https://t.co/cslaML3DGv

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 18, 2025

IMPROVE YOUR SKIN: NutraVive Crepe Repair Cream. #CommissionEarned

NEXT WE’LL FIND OUT THEY ARE ACTUALLY A NATURAL PHENOMENON: Microplastics discovered in caddisfly casings from the 1970s suggest long-term contamination.

WELL, GOOD: Research identifies key enzyme target to fight deadly brain cancers.

SOON EVERYONE WILL BE SKINNY, AND BEING SKINNY WON’T BE NEARLY AS COOL: Eli Lilly finds its weight-loss pill works just as well as Ozempic — and investors are loving it. “The data showed that the once-daily pill reduced patients’ weight by an average of 16 pounds, or about 8% of their body weight, and lowered their A1C, a blood-sugar measure, by an average of 1.3% to 1.6%. The pill form is in line with injectable GLP-1 drugs, like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, a diabetes drug also used for weight loss.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Real Housewives of Space Edition.

THERE SHOULD BE SHARP LIMITS ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ENROLLMENTS IN GENERAL: Feds warn Harvard may lose ability to enroll international students.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY: University of Austin’s ‘Merit-First Admissions’ automatically admits students based on test scores.

“I DIDN’T INHALE”: Van Hollen Backtracks As El Salvador Stunt Backfires Spectacularly.

THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: The Failure of the Expert Class. . .Again.

The problem with the expert class isn’t so much that they override the will of the people, it’s that they face no consequences for being wrong.

Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?

Truer every day.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Remember that time Barack Hussein Obama blamed the Benghazi embassy attacks on a random guy who made a YouTube video that nobody had ever seen and immediately threw him in jail and that was just fine? https://t.co/9ifadpa97p

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 18, 2025

REMEMBER APOLLO 13 [VIP]: Sky Candy and a Big Week in Space History.

And don’t forget there’s a daily dose of space and sky candy at my substack The Stars Our Destination.

NO, EASTER WAS NOT STOLEN FROM PAGANS: It’s Easter weekend, so odds are excellent you will hear or read that the early Christians “stole” Easter from various pagan holiday practices. Rod Martin observes:

“Every year, as Christians around the world celebrate Easter, skeptics revive a familiar claim: that Easter is just a repackaged pagan festival. They point to spring fertility rites, to goddesses like Ishtar and Eostre, and to symbols like eggs and rabbits, declaring Christianity guilty of cultural plagiarism.

“But these assertions, repeated so often they’ve become clichés, collapse under any serious historical scrutiny. The truth is simple: Easter isn’t pagan, and neither are its origins. Rather, it is the central celebration of the Christian faith, grounded in real events, rooted in Jewish (not pagan) practice.”

Martin, who was a member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team, then addresses each of the major variations of the “Easter was stolen from pagans” claims and demonstrates their utter improbability. It’s a bit lengthy, but well-worth the reading time for those who seek the facts.